Published by Douglas Messerli, the World Cinema Review features full-length reviews on film from the beginning of the industry to the present day, but the primary focus is on films of intelligence and cinematic quality, with an eye to exposing its readers to the best works in international film history.

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Victor Sjöstrom | The Scarlet Letter

undoing the past

by Douglas Messerli

Frances
Marion (writer and titles, based on the novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne), Victor
Sjöstrom (director) The Scarlet Letter /
1926

Swedish
director Victor Sjöstrom’s film adaptation of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, made during the director’s short “Hollywood” period,
is surely one of his best films, and perhaps the most powerful performance ever
of its central actor, Lillian Gish. By comparison to this silent work, Gish’s
work in the 1930 talkie I watched immediately after viewing this film on TCM, One Romantic Night, seemed somewhat
bland and unexpressive. Not so in The
Scarlet Letter in which Gish, quite literally, lets her beautiful hair down
several times, particularly early in the film when she goes rushing into the
woods after her escaped bird. This series of events is beautifully filmed by
Sjöstrom and his cinematographer Hendrik Sartov, as his camera fluidly tracks
the beautiful young woman dressed all in white—as opposed to the church-going
Puritans, clad mostly in black—saying almost everything that needs to be said
about this oppressive culture, where even allowing a bird to sing on the
Sabbath, let alone running and chasing after it, is deeply forbidden—as if joy
and beauty were an anathema to God.

In the closed and claustrophobic world of
Sjöstrom’s Boston, nothing can be hidden from the sight of nosy and viciously
gossiping neighbors such as Mistress Hibbins (Marcelle Corday); and punishment
for the young steamstress’ transgressions immediately follows, ordered by the
elders. It is not enough that she be brought before the kinder church minister,
The Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale (played by the striking Swedish actor Lars
Hanson) to be scolded before the entire community, but the now seemingly
innocent act puts Hester Prynne in the pillories for her “crime.” As Dimmesdale
tenderly releases her from her bodily imprisonment, he is struck by her beauty,
which follows, soon after, with a quite steamy love scene, again played in the
woods.

Unlike in Hawthorne’s tale, accordingly,
where we only gradually discover the intense sexual relationship between the
minister and Hester, here everything is established from the beginning. And the
director makes clear from the very first scenes that the hugs and touches
between these two beautiful beings is against not only community norms but law,
as soon after, we observe the comical wooing of the work’s dunce-like Master Giles
of a young woman wherein they are forced to speak to one another over a table
through a long tube-like device that keeps them worlds apart. A quick, stolen
goodbye kiss, ends in Giles being ousted not only from the house but from his
would-be lover’s life.

In Hawthorne the gradual discovery of the
relationship between Dimmesdale and Hester reiterates his and the community’s
hypocrisy. But here (in reality, Hanson speaking in Swedish, Gish in English) we
are presented with the background events of Dimmesdale’s later “treason,” which
create a far deeper sense of sympathy for both the minister and Hester. Here we
see both her own flirtations and demurrals as well as the powerful forces of love
emanating from the Reverend. As Hester states the obvious, they live in a world
that is “afraid of love,” a community terrorized by even the vision of women’s
undergarments.

If that leads us to more fully sympathize
equally with Dimmesdale, the director further allows us feel the extreme
tensions that the two feel even before Hester’s adultery is revealed through
the birth of young daughter, Pearl. Dimmesdale desperately desires to marry
this woman—which would have saved their lives—but it is Hester who is most
responsible for the situation, not through her sexual responses, but through
her lies, through the fact that she has not revealed her marriage to Roger
Chillingworth until Dimmesdale is about to leave the country on a mission to
the English King. Hester’s crime and punishment, accordingly, is not correctly
perceived by the vengeful and cruel community: hers is not a crime passion or
wonton sexuality, as much as it is that she, just like most in this community, is
unable to face the truth, fearful of losing what she has attained—in her case, the
love of Dimmesdale. In short, although she is publically humiliated for her
aberrant behavior, she is, in fact, one of them, and like them, desperate to
hide the truth.

This is particularly obvious in this film
when Dimmesdale, returning from his voyage, discovers her plight. While he is
determined to confess all, she insists that he continue to keep it secret, to
serve the community rather than reveal to that society that he and they are all
equally sinners. It is this internalization of reality that ultimately dooms not
only both lovers, Dimmesdale and Hester, but also the community at large. Even
Master Giles’ determined revenge on Mistress Hibbins for her insufferable
gossip, is based on a lie, as he, pretending to be her, play-acts in a scene of
imaginary gossip against town leaders who accidently (purposely to him)
overhear her words. The result is dreadful series of dunkings into a nearby
pond.

The lies indeed insinuate themselves into
the lives of all, but particularly into the heart of this more appealing
Dimmesdale, who, after saving Pearl from being taken from Hester by baptizing
his daughter (itself, in this society, surely a sacrilegious act) spends much
of the rest of the film with hand over heart, as he wastes away, daily
retreating from living.

Sjöstrom doubles the couple’s torture by
bringing back Hester’s missing husband, Chillingworth, who, as a doctor saves
Pearl’s life, but as a husband determines to revenge his wife (and, more
indirectly than in Hawthorne’s work, Dimmesdale) by simply reappearing at
auspicious moments. If the letter A she is forced to wear to the end of her
life might remind her of her supposed sin, the more frightening punishment is
Chillingworth’s constant reminder of his knowledge about the truth of the events.

For a brief moment, these two tortured
beings attempt to imagine some way out of their assigned fate through an escape
to Spain where they may begin again, where they may free themselves from their
tortured past—brilliantly symbolized in the film by Hester’s temporary removal
of her A from her dress. But we have already perceived that the A signifying
their past actions will be forever emblazoned upon their memories as we watch
the young Pearl draw the same figure in the sand, as if beginning her studies
of the alphabet. And Chillingworth’s presence simply reasserts that fact.

It is Chillingworth’s presence, finally, that
forces Dimmesdale to make a public confession about his involvement, revealing,
in his personal anguish, that the same letter attached to Hester’s dress has
been branded by iron upon his chest. Whereas Hawthorne may wonder if this was
miraculous event wrought by the hand of God, in Sjöstrom’s far more corporeal
rendering of the tale we have no question that the A upon the minister’s chest
is a self-inflicted punishment for his own lack of moral daring. Yet again the
Swedish director fully redeems Dimmesdale through the man’s confession, which
itself, temporarily at least, saves his community by revealing the truth, that
all men are sinners, that the mud they sling upon Hester and Pearl is that in
which they themselves also walk.

If the film version differs, quite
radically at times, from the beloved fiction, it still works as an adaptation
that raises most of Hawthorne’s themes while presenting the work’s heroes in
more humane terms. And upon Dimmesdale’s death, in our empathy, we are quite
ready to forgive his long silence. This silent film, after all, has audibly
asserted what was in his heart.